World reacts as Taliban announces new Afghan government

US expresses concern over ‘track record’ of people named to top posts, while UN agency decries exclusion of women.

The Taliban has announced an all-male caretaker government drawn exclusively from its inner echelons, including a man under United Nations sanctions as prime minister and another on a United States “terrorism” list as interior minister. The names announced for the new government on Tuesday, three weeks after the Taliban swept to military victory as US-led foreign forces withdrew, gave no sign of an olive branch to its opponents. Mullah Mohammad Hasan Akhund – a senior minister during the Taliban’s brutal and oppressive rule in the 1990s – was appointed interim prime minister, while co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar, who oversaw the signing of the US withdrawal agreement in 2020, was appointed deputy prime minister.